What PC to buy to get the most out of Windows Vista.

You’ve seen it, read about it, and may have tried parts of it, but now the finished Windows Vista is available, it’s time to get the perfect system for whichever edition you choose.

While any PC that meets the base specification can run the four editions, it makes sense to opt for a system suited to your needs. You’re least likely to encounter the Business edition. Tailored for offices, it includes features for security and data back-up. Desktop systems tend to be less powerful and come with lower-cost displays and peripherals, but offer value. These are good for office applications and performing internet tasks.

A Home Basic machine isn’t less competent, but this edition is more likely to be found on budget systems, so you could expect these PCs to have less powerful processors and graphics cards, with lower capacity hard drives. This system should offer a good office, online and gaming experience without being pricey.

Home Premium opens up Media Center capabilities, while the Ultimate edition will be found on the best machines around – expect them to have the fastest processors, highest specifications and heftiest price tags.

Article continues

I’ve taken a look at one particularly suitable PC for each edition, plus a briefer view of another as an alternative. These should provide an idea of the specifications to look for to run each Windows Vista edition – and a guide to the prices. But special offers change almost daily in the PC market, so keep a close eye on both web sites and high street stores to spot the best value-for-money deals.

The Evesham Visto will run Windows Vista Home Basic version with ease

If your PC tasks involve little more than browsing the web, sending email and word processing, there’s no need to splash out on a high-end PC suited for more intensive uses. Windows Vista Home Basic edition will suit you fine, and the Evesham Visto is a capable machine on which to run it. However, Home Basic is missing some of the great stuff you’ll find in Home Premium – the Aero glass interface and Media Center, for starters.

It feels like a bit of a disservice to the Evesham to class it as a Home Basic machine – it’s like calling first-year classes in a rocket science course ‘basic’. The system here is a well-balanced, entry-level gaming machine, the key component being the GeForce 7600GX graphics card, which gives it enough 3D power to handle the latest games with all their special effects. The only weakness is that it won’t handle high resolutions as competently as more expensive cards would, which is ultimately what you pay your money for – but given that the LCD monitor only has a fi xed resolution, you’re unlikely to hit those heights anyway.

As always with Evesham systems, this model comes with a selection of desirable peripherals – from a wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse to a Creative surround sound speaker system and a 19-inch widescreen LCD display. These will enable you to get the most out of not just your gaming fun but also music and movies.

Compromising a little, the system uses the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor. While this has a dual core and is thus a dab hand at doing several things at once, it’s a touch slower than some of other systems on the market. It’s not a crippling problem, but it does mean that the Visto is not as good at high definition video playback, and is slower for encoding movies – but only by a little. As faults go, it’s a minor one given the affordable price.

The Dell Dimension will cope with Windows Vista Aero Glass interface

Most PC users will want to go for Windows Vista Home Premium, the edition that’s perfect for home use. It comes with the gorgeous new Aero Glass interface, and Media Center, which enables you to turn your PC into a complete home entertainment device – for watching, pausing and recording TV, and enjoying your digital music and photos.

As for a PC to run it on – how about this Dell Dimension? I’m glad to see Dell is trying to make its systems more home-friendly. The partial white design looks good, although it’s odd that the white sides don’t match the silver and black front or the supplied black or silver peripherals.

Despite the split personality of the colour scheme, the system is well engineered and configured. From the easy-to-open side panel – for simple upgrades and maintenance – to the quiet cooling system, it offers a level of performance to quench most people’s technological thirst.

With Dell, specifications are flexible, so I opted for a Media Center remote, which offers sofa-based entertainment without the need for mouse or keyboard, and an ATi X1300 graphics card. Capable of playing the latest 3D games competently, this offers TV-out via S-video, so it could be hooked up to a big screen.

For storage, a 250G hard drive is adequate, though it’s around the minimum I’d like to see. Twin DVD drives, one of which is a DVD+/-RW drive, is a nice option and the same can be said for the integrated 13-in-1 card reader.

The upgrade to Vista Home Premium Edition is a perfect choice with the addition of the Media Center remote, and it performs really well. It might not be something you’d want in the living room, but if you want a useful PC that will stretch to home entertainment, the Dell is a really compelling option.

The ThinkCentre A60 can handle the needs of Windows Vista Business

If you’re a business user, you probably won’t need the entertainment aspects offered by Home Premium, but you’ll want tools to help you be more productive, whether working in the offi e or from home. Windows Vista Business has been designed with this in mind. As with Home Basic, you’ll miss out on Media Center, and here you’ll also miss out on Parental Controls – but because Business edition is created with company networks in mind, there’s functionality to help with connecting and sharing files, to stop unwanted software and hardware being installed, and to make it easy to sync files from the network to your computer.

And while Lenovo (what used to be IBM’s Personal Computing Division) has an entire new range of desktop systems aimed at all walks of life, a large section are designed for businesses. People in offices aren’t usually rocking to digital tunes, enjoying movies or playing new 3D games. They’re more likely to be poring over spreadsheets or entering details into a web interface.

While this doesn’t provide the most exciting system, it does make for low cost, reliability and a quiet system, which sums up the ThinkCentre A60. And it does at least come with a dual core Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor that’s powerful enough to quickly process video and audio.

While its price certainly seems like a bargain, note that this only gets you the base unit. Display and speakers have to be bought separately or supplied by your good self, making this a more sensible purchase if you’re looking to replace an ancient PC and have these spare.

It’s not going to give you the most exciting introduction of the new features in Windows Vista, but with a 160GB hard drive and 512MB of memory, it delivers the base level at a suitable price.

The PCNextDay does it all

Windows Vista Ultimate edition combines all the entertainment functionality of Home Premium with all the advanced networking capabilities of the Business edition – but as you’d expect from anything that sounds this fantastic, it does come with a similarly tremendous price.

If this sounds like the edition of Windows Vista for you, however, then it makes sense to get a great PC to run it – and somebody is going to have a lot of fun with this PCNextDay system. It’s difficult to know where to start with all its virtues, but the 24-inch Acer display is pretty hard to top and will show movies, games and the beautiful Windows Vista interface off to brilliant effect. A good reason for opting for such an expensive display is the twin Crossfi re ATI graphics cards. These are top of the range, and the pair provide some of the fastest and most impressive gaming results around.

This combination also goes a long way towards explaining the high price – opting for a 19-inch display and a single Radeon X1950XTX graphics card would knock off as much as a hefty £600 or so, while still providing an excellent gaming experience.

But it’s partly down to whether you really want an ultimate system. Two gigabytes of main system memory has that side of things covered, and twin optical drives are also good to see – with one being an all-singing dual layer +/- rewriter, the other a plain 16-speed read-only drive.

All of that hardware does make for a hefty system, and the impressive tower case is certainly a great place to keep it all, with plenty of future expansion space. The only less than impressive area is the processor. The Core 2 Duo is very powerful, and should do anyone proud, but at this high price we might have expected something a touch higher up the rankings. While the 400GB storage isn’t earth-shattering, this is offset by the hugely fast 74GB Raptor boot drive.

Neil Mohr contributes to Windows Vista: The Official Magazine, and works as a freelance technology journalist.

Add to del.icio.us | Digg This Article | Add to StumbleUpon